Daily Newsletter

[Martin Hawksey]

We’re interested in your feedback for the Daily Newsletter. What do you like, how would you like it improved?

[Roger Harrison]

Hi, I like the daily newsletter – it keeps me reminded about the course, it is simple and straight to the point. IT does what it says on the tin.

I wonder though if you can do anything to the Course Reader so that it can show more of the first part of each posting – at the moment it is very difficult to get a sense of what is posted as we are all generally posting around similar topics in a way. The Categories list helps a bit for finding info on specific topics.

Also are there any plans to set up a Mendeley group for the course that we all contribute and share resources to, and possibly Diigo as well? I’m thinking of doing this anyway for the small group Forum which is gathering interest.

As for the small groups, will these then be transferred and continue through the rest of the course – in other words they are not just for the Induction? even though they are currently found in the Induction forum section.

I also wonder what your views are on setting up a facebook page? I’m going to see what people in the Forum I set up think about this. I do find it a lot easier and far less clunkier to navigate etc. but lets see.

Is there a way of having a fixed signature so that when ever I reply to a posting I don’t have to keep on writing my name, location and my blog address?

thanks – I imagine it must be very hectic at your end!

[Marion Meyerolbersleben]

The daily newsletter is very very useful!

[Martin Hawksey]

Hi Roger,

Thanks for your feedback, all very useful. Below I’ve tried to address each of the areas you mention:

Course Reader
I take your point about adding more of a snippet and will look into this. Out of interest were you aware that clicking the post title expanded the post to show it’s content?

Mendeley Group
As it happens one of the course participants has recently done this and you can join the group here and we have just started pulling activity from this group in the course reader.

One of our underlying philosophies is to not create places on every platform going, but instead let participants find or create the spaces that suit them. This way we hope to accommodate the wide variety of learning styles, workflows, personal preferences etc of participants but also allow new communities to form which are sustainable being the course. One thing I thing we can do better is signpost these communities. To help this I”ll start a page with these which I hope to top up with a list of all the participant blogs.

Small groups
As other MOOCs have found formal group forming can be very problematic. Instead we’ve opted for groups to be self-forming so people are free to continue these, swap groups, join multiple groups.

Facebook page
If Facebook is where you feel most comfortable I’d definitely encourage you to create a page. I’m sure there will be others on the course who would find that place useful and if you do create a page we’d definitely add it to the other places page to help people cluster.

Fixed signature
Within the octel site if you are logged in this should be automatically filled in. Unfortunately we can’t pass these details to external sites. I’d be interested to hear any tips or advice others have to do this.

If I’ve missed anything or something is still unclear let me know

Martin

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